1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed towards systems, apparatus, and methods for moving singulated products of random configuration to a final destination. More particularly, the present invention is directed towards a passive system, apparatus, and method for transferring poultry products exiting the chiller to a cone or shackle line.
2. Description of the Related Art
Food processing is one of Georgia's leading industrial sectors, and one of the largest industrial employers in Georgia. The industry and the agriculture are a big part of the Georgia economy (the leading producer of chicken in the United States). Georgia is the third largest poultry producer in the world. Poultry processing is highly mechanized, and produces 24.6 million pounds of chicken every day.
In the majority of poultry plants, a water chiller is used to cool birds immediately after slaughtering, evisceration, and defeathering. Upon exiting the chiller, the birds are manually rehung onto shackles. It can take from two-to-six individuals on the line to rehang the birds in order to meet production requirements.
The poultry industry is interested in reducing manual labor for many reasons, not the least of which is safety concerns for both the worker and the consuming public. There are many health-related issues associated with continuous repetitive motions, like those necessary in the rehanging process.
To produce the millions of pounds of poultry, mechanization has been introduced into processing plants, but various steps are not yet automated. In those areas, manual labor is used, and in many instances workers are called upon to work long hours, and use the same movement their entire shift. The relatively difficult working conditions of poultry processing plants are not the only problems for laborers. There are physical and psychological impacts too. Performing the same movement all day with a sustained rhythm is not healthy. It can create a lot of problems on the articulations, and on the musculature. Particular to the shackling process, rehanging work is repetitive.
Robots have been used in systems that require repetitive processes, as they can be designed to perform such repetitive steps continuously, almost without fail, with extreme precision and at high speed. However, robots have not yet been fully adapted for handling non-rigid materials, such a birds. There is current research into end-effectors able to effectively handle birds, and robots with such end-effectors have been tested in static cases (the bird and the shackle are not moving). Others have worked with the theory of how robots would operate in dynamic situations (handling moving birds and hanging them on a moving shackle line), but implementation of such a working system, beyond just theory, in a poultry plant has not occurred. It is generally assumed robotic substitution in this part of the poultry process will not work, as it has been shown that the robotic manipulation of shackling can take from six to seven seconds to process a single bird, making it three to four times slower than the human process of moving a bird from a conveyor to a shackle line.
Therefore, today's poultry companies are not looking to robotic systems as potential solutions for shackle loading systems, as they are shown to be too complicated a solution for this industry, and perhaps even ultimately unsuccessful. Thus, a need exists for flexible and economically priced systems, apparatus, and methods to move singulated poultry products of unknown position and orientation from a moving conveyor belt to a cone or shackle line. The present invention is directed to a simpler, passive system to handle this need.